Star Wars_ Young Jedi Knights 12_ Return to Ord Mantell - Kevin J. Anderson [46]
Jacen and Jaina flanked the young villager, with Tenel Ka and Lowbacca each moving out on either side of the group, their senses alert.
Lowie's dark nose snuffled the air, and his ginger fur bristled with intense concentration. The young Wookiee had survived the dangerous underlevel forests of Kashyyyk, and had won his precious fiber belt by snatching the threads from a carnivorous syren plant. Compared with the ominous forests of the Wookiee world, the woods of Anobis couldn't be too dangerous, Jacen thought.
But then, he wondered, after twenty years of civil war, how many hidden booby traps had been planted in the dense foliage?
They crunched their way along an ill-defined path. Jacen's feet popped spherical mushrooms, and wet shapeless things slithered out of the way in the weeds. With a buzzing cry of alarm, two flying creatures that looked halfway between moth and bird fluttered into the upper sparkling leaves.
Within moments it seemed as if the forest had swallowed them up, and Jacen could no longer see the cleared cropland behind them.
As the day strengthened and the sunlight grew brighter, the forest shadows remained a thick lattice around them, allowing only scattered glimpses of the bright blue sky overhead.
Tenel Ka turned her gray eyes toward Jacen; in a cold voice, she said,
"Anja could have stayed here to help guide us through. Perhaps she and some of her people planted their own traps."
Jacen felt an irrational urge to defend the orphaned girl. "You don't know that about her," he said. "Just because her people have suffered as much as these"-he turned his chin toward the stumbling villagers"doesn't mean you have to think the worst of her."
Tenel Ka gave him a puzzled look. "We just need to be aware of the dangers here," she said, and then drifted away.
Suddenly, Lowie howled and raised his hairy arms, gesturing for them all to stop. The people, already on edge, halted in their tracks, glancing around with wide eyes. Em Teedee said, "Ah, yes, Master Lowbacca. I see it too. How horrible!"
"M%at is it?" Jaina came close to the Wookiee. As the sunlight glittered through, Jacen could see a fine tracery stretched between the silver tree trunks, a gossamer line like the whisper of a cobweb.
Lowie picked up a branch from the ground and tossed it in front of him.
The branch passed through the faint lines and dropped to the ground on the other side, sliced cleanly into small pieces.
"Monofilament wire?" Jaina asked.
Jacen ewne close and understood the threat: a fiber so strong and so thin it surpassed even the sharpest razor blade. Anything that touched it would pass through and be sliced in two.
The villager in front stopped, looking greenish with dismay. "That wasn't here before," he said. "I slipped through here to the mountain village just six standard days ago."
"Then everything has changed," Tenel Ka said, not asking what this farmer would have been doing on his way to the mining settlement.
"We must be cautious."
Carefully, they skirted the wire-strung trees, giving them a wide berth.
But just as they passed into what they thought was safety, a hidden motion sensor hummed. A laser beam tracked them, spraying a red targeting lance toward the group. "Look out!" Jaina cried as the refugees scattered and dove.
The weapon discharged and blazed holes through nearby trees. One middle-aged man cried out and fell backward into the bushes with a blackened hole through one shoulder. Then, after only a few seconds, the laser ceased firing.
The young Jedi Knights waited in hiding for a few moments, expecting another attack, but when the forest fell quiet again except for the leftover squawks and rustlings of disturbed forest creatures, Jaina stood up and made her way toward the source of the laser blasts.
She found the hidden weapon, its energy pack drained. "It's a single-use